Make hidden curriculum labour visible.
Three transparent calculators make curriculum production and resource-development work visible in measures schools can meaningfully examine: professional hours, equivalent working days and the indicative labour value of that work.
These calculators answer two different questions, and it matters which one you are asking.
Calculator 02 measures time returned. It starts with the hours teachers already spend sourcing and producing materials and models how much of that could be streamlined and deliberately redirected. The output is capacity a school already holds and could use differently.
Calculators 01 and 03 measure labour replaced. They ask a different question: if your school set out to produce curriculum resources at this standard by hand, what professional labour would that consume? The answer is routinely more time than any school has. That is the point, not a flaw in the model. Most schools do not currently produce resources at this standard because the labour is unaffordable, not because the standard is not valued. These figures represent work a school would otherwise have to fund, not hours a teacher gets back.
Where time is genuinely returned to teachers, its most important value is educational: capacity to build and sustain relationships, to provide timely and comprehensive feedback that supports student growth, and to preserve the energy required for enthusiastic, responsive teaching. These human dimensions matter more, not less, in an AI-rich world.
The calculators do not manufacture a saving or guarantee a return. They expose every assumption so leaders can replace the defaults with local evidence and test the scale of the work for themselves.
Use the calculator that matches the decision.
The three calculators are deliberately separate. They examine related work through different lenses and use two different economic models, so their outputs must never be added together.
Production-equivalent value
Applies documented production assumptions for learning activities, performance-descriptor drafts, Core Docs and When, What, How curriculum pages to your school’s own editable volumes, and shows the professional labour that producing the same material manually would consume.
Model production-equivalent labourRecurring planning capacity
Models the share of existing weekly planning and resource-production time that could be streamlined and deliberately redirected to higher-value teaching work. This is the only calculator that models time teachers currently spend.
Test recurring planning capacityCurriculum-development comparison
Provides a whole-curriculum reference for the level of investment that instructional-development research indicates high-quality resource production can require, then compares that labour with editable adapted-resource assumptions and CED’s stated design objective.
Compare development approachesWhat this quality of resource would cost to build by hand
This calculator does not model time teachers currently spend. It models the professional labour that producing the same resources manually, to the same standard, would consume. Adjust the assumptions to reflect your school. It begins with one teacher so the scale of a single teaching load is immediately visible.
How to read this calculator. The hours below are modelled traditional production times: the labour required to create each item manually at the standard Core Education Design architecture produces. They are working assumptions drawn from professional practice, not an independent measurement study, and the totals can legitimately exceed a teacher’s available working hours. That is the finding, not an error. Most schools do not produce material at this standard because the labour has never been affordable.
- Core Doc
- A Core Education Design instrument for senior-course monitoring, structured as a systematic equivalent of the course monitoring records used in NSW Stage 6. It is a design and workflow tool. It is not a compliance product, and it does not of itself satisfy any NESA, school or system requirement.
- When, What, How curriculum page
- A Core Education Design course-design resource, effectively an interactive student-facing scope and sequence, built to improve navigation, usability and the accessibility of learning.
| Resource | Items per subject | Items per teacher | Manual production hours per item | Equivalent development hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| High-quality learning activity Starting point: one activity per week across 40 teaching weeks. | 200 | 2.67 | 533.3 | |
| Performance-descriptor draft Uses the conservative lower end of the modelled range. | 40 | 11.25 | 450.0 | |
| Core Doc for senior-course monitoring Entered per teacher because not every subject requires a senior Core Doc. | Not applicable | 6.00 | 6.0 | |
| When, What, How curriculum page Uses the conservative lower end of the modelled range. | 20 | 10.00 | 200.0 |
What this figure is: the replacement cost of the professional labour. It is what a school would have to fund to produce this material by hand at the same standard. In most schools that work is not currently funded, resourced or completed at all, which is why the total can exceed the hours any teacher has available.
What this figure is not: hours returned to teachers, money removed from a budget, or a reduction in salary expenditure. For time genuinely returned to existing staff, use Calculator 02. The two results measure different things and must never be added together.
What is not included: programs, scope and sequences, assessment tasks and many other resources that are also substantially faster to design using Core Education Design architecture and tools.
Quality and staff-capacity scenario.
This calculator starts with the school’s current planning workload, isolates the share spent sourcing and producing resources, then applies a locally selected streamlining estimate. It is the only calculator on this page that models time teachers currently spend. It is intended to model recurring annual capacity, not the complete economic impact of a consultancy engagement.
Recurring planning and production capacity
Change every input to reflect your school. The most useful result is the most defensible local scenario, not the largest number.
How to interpret this result
The calculated hours represent production capacity that could potentially be redirected to instructional refinement, feedback, collaboration, differentiation and support for learners. The calculation automatically caps addressable production time at the total planning time entered. It does not demonstrate that every school will achieve the selected streamlining rate, that workload disappears, or that salary expenditure can be removed. The dollar figure values the redirected hours, it does not represent cash returned to the school.
Curriculum-development labour comparison.
This calculator is a whole-curriculum reference point for the investment that instructional-development research indicates high-quality resource production can require. It asks what volume of development labour is implied when a school creates or adapts a defined body of material, compares three editable development ratios, and uses the adapted-resource model as the primary baseline. No individual teacher has the time or support to work at these ratios, and most schools do not currently fund or record curriculum development at this level. That gap is what the calculator is designed to make visible.
Curriculum-development comparison model
The ratios are transparent modelling inputs. They are not fixed facts about your school and should be adjusted where local evidence is available.
Where the ratios come from. The published 24.33:1 and 38.33:1 ratios indicate the substantial professional labour that high-quality instructional development can require in a properly resourced environment. They come from professional instructional-development research conducted in corporate and higher-education settings, not from a validated benchmark for routine Australian school curriculum production. They are included as a reference for the true cost of quality, and they should be adjusted where local evidence supports a different figure.
The CED-enabled ratio. The default 1:1 ratio is Core Education Design’s stated design objective for schools operating with CED architecture, tools and design support: to make the depth and consistency normally associated with high-input resource development achievable at close to a 1:1 development-to-delivery workflow. It is a design objective, not an achieved, audited or independently verified result. It is the assumption most worth challenging, and it is editable for exactly that reason. A school considering this work should ask for the underlying basis before relying on it.
What this model cannot do. It compares labour volumes under stated assumptions. It cannot establish a guaranteed return, and it does not represent money that would appear in a school budget.
| Development model | Development hours | Indicative labour value | Hours avoided against adapted baseline | Labour value difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional development | 220,781 | $22,078,080 | Not benchmarked here | Not benchmarked here |
| Adapted or OER development | 140,141 | $14,014,080 | Comparison baseline | $0 |
| CED design-objective scenario | 5,760 | $576,000 | 134,381 | $13,438,080 |
Instructional hours represented
Subjects per year group × year groups × instructional hours per subject.
Development hours
Instructional hours represented × selected development ratio.
Labour value difference
Development hours avoided against the adapted baseline × hourly staff-capacity value.
This is replacement cost, not money saved
The default result reflects a whole-school, whole-curriculum comparison across 5,760 hours of instruction. It expresses what the same development labour would cost to buy at the rate entered. It is not a forecast that the school will receive that amount, remove that amount from staffing, or avoid every modelled development hour in a single year. Most of the labour it values is work schools do not currently fund at all. The real implementation scope, existing resource base, reuse rate, adoption, quality requirements and period of development all materially affect the outcome.
Transparent enough to challenge.
A credible calculator should invite scrutiny. These models expose their inputs, calculations and limitations so leaders can replace the defaults with local evidence and reject assumptions that do not fit their context.
Recurring workload evidence
Used in Calculator 02 to establish that planning, sourcing and resource creation represent a substantial workload category. These sources do not evaluate Core Education Design.
Development-ratio context
Used in Calculator 03 as contextual modelling inputs only. The source settings are corporate and higher-education instructional development, which differ from routine school curriculum work, so the ratios must not be represented as verified Australian school benchmarks.
What these figures can and cannot support.
The models are decision aids. They become misleading when scenario outputs are stripped of their assumptions or described as verified financial returns.
They can reveal scale
Distributed and unfunded work becomes visible when production labour is aggregated across staff, subjects and weeks.
They can test assumptions
Leaders can replace every default with local workload, staffing and implementation evidence, including the assumptions that favour CED.
They cannot guarantee return
Real outcomes depend on baseline practice, adoption, governance, quality, implementation discipline and how released capacity is used.
Independence and disclosure
Core Education Design operates independently of the NSW Department of Education. Company work is undertaken outside Departmental working time and without the use of Departmental equipment, systems or resources. Services, views and materials provided by Core Education Design do not represent the NSW Department of Education unless explicitly commissioned or authorised by the Department.
Core Education Design receives no commission, referral fee or reseller margin from platform vendors. Where a Core Education product or licence is proposed, that interest is declared in writing. Actual, potential and perceived conflicts of interest are identified and disclosed before work commences.
Core Education Design is a registered trading name of Zenith Creative Solutions Pty Ltd, ACN 698 843 471, ABN 72 698 843 471. The figures on this page are modelling outputs produced by Core Education Design and have not been independently audited.
The next step is not to defend the biggest number.
It is to identify a locally credible scenario, examine where teacher expertise is being consumed by repeatable production work, and decide what higher-value educational work that capacity should support.
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